News & Dev

Manic Mondoid

April 20, 2015

It’s just another Manic Mondoid, and no: we can’t quite believe that it’s taken us this long to make a reference to The Bangles either. There’s lots of fun stuff brewing here in Zomboidton, and today we’ve got a few updates on the upcoming animation system as well as Build 32’s new crafting and broadcast system. Hope you like!

Chris and Martin’s Animation Adventures

After running into some export issues that slowed us down for a bit while when we tried to get all of PZ’s current hair and clothes working with the new animations we’re now back to the exciting stage of implementing them over into the game itself. Let’s go over to Lemmy for some on-the-spot reportage!

“Animation stuff is going well. The bank of animations that our animator Martin is creating is growing larger by the day. We now have a tall fence climbing anim, for example, so survivors have another escape route from the horde. On top of this panicked or clumsy survivors will soon find themselves tripping over when running, turning corners and vaulting fences at high speeds – as well as scrambling along the floor trying to get back to their feet. This will all be done with animation driven movement, and should make for some really exciting gameplay moments. We’re not quite ready for another video, but hopefully soon!”

RJ’s Build 32 Adventures

Meanwhile in France: coder Romain Dron is still worrying his fiancée by leaving windows open on his PC that contain information that would be of interest to paranoid government officials.

“Right now I’m still balancing and testing the new trap crafting and recipes, and doing some additional research on them too. It’s important that they’re not too overpowered or too useless, after all. I’ve got all the MP code up and running, but whether in SP or MP a mix of engineer and electrician skills will be the most useful if you want to turn your safehouse into a trap-laden nightmare for interlopers.”

“I’ve also just added sound effects, and if you think zombies are attracted to the noise of gunfire – wait and see how they react to a pipebomb! While I’m in there I’m also playing around with fire spread, so you don’t burn down a whole neighbourhood with a single Molotov. After a lot of talk with Twiggy we’ve also thought of a few more traps and devices that would be useful, so there might be a few more surprises.”

Will and Turbo’s Broadcast Adventures

Finally over to Will, [who’s actually the guy writing this but… hey-ho] for an update on the new TV/radio system that will let you listen in on the world falling apart.

“We’re at the point now at which all the systems are ready and waiting, so basically I’m going to be ‘writing up to the line’ in terms of Build 32 testing. In a perfect world I’d like 5 TV channels and 5 Radio stations ready to go in the first drop, so there’s still quite a lot to do – not least because whenever I think of fun new events and lore elements I have to go back and tweak each of the broadcast timelines. The thinking is that this batch will cover ‘official’ broadcasts and transmissions, while survivor/military channels commenting on the same events will follow later on.”

“That said, to give me some extra options, Turbo’s also worked on a way to get different fonts and custom images into the lines that appear on-screen. This came from my request to have a ‘musical notation’ symbol so that it’d be clear when a line was sung or a radio jingle – it should put us in fine stead for the development of the system too. Turbo is now off investigating the integration and development of his ApCom Ham Radio and Walkie Talkies mod for future builds.

In Other News about Adventures

A quick request from EnigmaGrey to see if anyone would like to help out as Admins on the new TIS SpiffoSpace Server. We basically need some nice community types to help out new players and keep an eye out for cheats. Please contact him via a direct message on the forums if you’re interested.